Physical symbol system

Formal logic: the symbols are words like and,

or, not, for all x and so on. The expressions
are statements in formal logic which can be true or
false. The processes are the rules of logical deduction.

See also: Philosophy of articial intelligence and Data

system
A physical symbol system (also called a formal system) takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them
into structures (expressions) and manipulating them (using processes) to produce new expressions.

Algebra: the symbols are "+", "", "x", "y", 1,

2, 3, etc. The expressions are equations. The
processes are the rules of algebra, that allow one to
manipulate a mathematical expression and retain its
truth.

The physical symbol system hypothesis (PSSH) is a

position in the philosophy of articial intelligence formulated by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon. They
wrote:

A digital computer: the symbols are zeros and ones

of computer memory, the processes are the operations of the CPU that change memory.

A physical symbol system has the

necessary and sucient means for general
intelligent action.[1]
Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon

Chess: the symbols are the pieces, the processes are

the legal chess moves, the expressions are the positions of all the pieces on the board.

This claim implies both that human thinking is a kind of The physical symbol system hypothesis claims that both
symbol manipulation (because a symbol system is neces- of these are also examples of physical symbol systems:
sary for intelligence) and that machines can be intelligent
(because a symbol system is sucient for intelligence).[2]
Intelligent human thought: the symbols are encoded
in our brains. The expressions are thoughts. The
The idea has philosophical roots in Hobbes (who claimed
processes are the mental operations of thinking.
reasoning was nothing more than reckoning), Leibniz
(who attempted to create a logical calculus of all human
A running articial intelligence program: The symideas), Hume (who thought perception could be reduced
bols are data. The expressions are more data. The
to atomic impressions) and even Kant (who analyzed
processes are programs that manipulate the data.
[3]
all experience as controlled by formal rules). The latest version is called the computational theory of mind,
associated with philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry
2 Arguments in favor of the physiFodor.[4]

cal symbol system hypothesis

The hypothesis has been criticized strongly by various

parties, but is a core part of AI research. A common
critical view is that the hypothesis seems appropriate for
higher-level intelligence such as playing chess, but less
appropriate for commonplace intelligence such as vision.
A distinction is usually made between the kind of high
level symbols that directly correspond with objects in the
world, such as <dog> and <tail> and the more complex
symbols that are present in a machine like a neural network.

2.1 Newell and Simon

Two lines of evidence suggested to Allen Newell and
Herbert A. Simon that symbol manipulation was the
essence of both human and machine intelligence: the development of articial intelligence programs and psychological experiments on human beings.
First, in the early decades of AI research there were
a number of very successful programs that used high
level symbol processing, such as Newell and Herbert A.
Simon's General Problem Solver or Terry Winograd's
SHRDLU.[5] John Haugeland named this kind of AI research Good Old Fashioned AI or GOFAI.[6] Expert
systems and logic programming are descendants of this
tradition. The success of these programs suggested that

Examples of physical symbol systems

Examples of physical symbol systems include:

1

3 CRITICISM

symbol processing systems could simulate any intelligent

action.
And second, psychological experiments carried out at the
same time found that, for dicult problems in logic, planning or any kind of puzzle solving, people used this kind
of symbol processing as well. AI researchers were able to
simulate the step by step problem solving skills of people
with computer programs. This collaboration and the issues it raised eventually would lead to the creation of the
eld of cognitive science.[7] (This type of research was
called "cognitive simulation.) This line of research suggested that human problem solving consisted primarily of
the manipulation of high level symbols.

2.2

Turing completeness

1. The erroneous claim that the [physical symbol system hypothesis] lacks symbol grounding" which is
presumed to be a requirement for general intelligent
action.
2. The common belief that AI requires non-symbolic
processing (that which can be supplied by a connectionist architecture for instance).
3. The common statement that the brain is simply not
a computer and that computation as it is currently
understood, does not provide an appropriate model
for intelligence.
4. And last of all that it is also believed in by some
that the brain is essentially mindless, most of what
takes place are chemical reactions and that human
intelligent behaviour is analogous to the intelligent
behaviour displayed for example by ant colonies.

In Newell and Simons arguments, the symbols that the

hypothesis is referring to are physical objects that represent things in the world, symbols such as <dog> that
have a recognizable meaning or denotation and can be 3.1 Dreyfus and the primacy of unconcomposed with other symbols to create more complex
scious skills
symbols.
However, it is also possible to interpret the hypothesis as Main article: Dreyfus critique of articial intelligence

referring to the simple abstract 0s and 1s in the memory

of a digital computer or the stream of 0s and 1s passing Hubert Dreyfus attacked the necessary condition of the
through the perceptual apparatus of a robot. These are, physical symbol system hypothesis, calling it the psyin some sense, symbols as well, although it is not always chological assumption and dening it thus:
possible to determine exactly what the symbols are standing for. In this version of the hypothesis, no distinction
The mind can be viewed as a device operating on bits
is being made between symbols and signals, as David
of information according to formal rules.[9]
Touretzky and Dean Pomerleau explain.[8]
Under this interpretation, the physical symbol system hypothesis asserts merely that intelligence can be digitized.
This is a weaker claim. Indeed, Touretzky and Pomerleau
write that if symbols and signals are the same thing, then
"[s]uciency is a given, unless one is a dualist or some
other sort of mystic, because physical symbol systems
are Turing-universal.[8] The widely accepted Church
Turing thesis holds that any Turing-universal system can
simulate any conceivable process that can be digitized,
given enough time and memory. Since any digital computer is Turing-universal, any digital computer can, in
theory, simulate anything that can be digitized to a sucient level of precision, including the behavior of intelligent organisms. The necessary condition of the physical
symbol systems hypothesis can likewise be nessed, since
we are willing to accept almost any signal as a form of
symbol and all intelligent biological systems have signal pathways.

Criticism

Dreyfus refuted this by showing that human intelligence

and expertise depended primarily on unconscious instincts rather than conscious symbolic manipulation. Experts solve problems quickly by using their intuitions,
rather than step-by-step trial and error searches. Dreyfus argued that these unconscious skills would never be
captured in formal rules.[10]

3.2 Searle and his Chinese room

Main article: Chinese room
John Searle's Chinese room argument, presented in 1980,
attempted to show that a program (or any physical symbol
system) could not be said to understand the symbols that
it uses; that the symbols have no meaning for the machine,
and so the machine can never be truly intelligent.[11]

3.3 Brooks and the roboticists

Nils Nilsson has identied four main themes or grounds Main articles: Articial intelligence, situated approach
in which the physical symbol system hypothesis has been and Moravecs paradox
attacked.[2]

3
In the sixties and seventies, several laboratories attempted [8] Reconstructing Physical Symbol Systems David S.
Touretzky and Dean A. Pomerleau Computer Science Deto build robots that used symbols to represent the world
partment Carnegie Mellon University Cognitive Science
and plan actions (such as the Stanford Cart). These
18(2):345353, 1994. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~{}dst/
projects had limited success. In the middle eighties,
pubs/simon-reply-www.ps.gz
Rodney Brooks of MIT was able to build robots that had
superior ability to move and survive without the use of [9] Dreyfus 1979, p. 156
symbolic reasoning at all. Brooks (and others, such as
Hans Moravec) discovered that our most basic skills of [10] Dreyfus 1972, Dreyfus 1979, Dreyfus & Dreyfus 1986.
See also Russell & Norvig 2003, pp. 950952, Crevier &
motion, survival, perception, balance and so on did not
1993 120132 and Hearn 2007, pp. 5051
seem to require high level symbols at all, that in fact, the
use of high level symbols was more complicated and less
[11] Searle 1980, Crevier 1993, pp. 269271
successful.
In a 1990 paper Elephants Don't Play Chess, robotics re- [12] Brooks 1990, p. 3
searcher Rodney Brooks took direct aim at the physical
symbol system hypothesis, arguing that symbols are not
always necessary since the world is its own best model. 6 References
It is always exactly up to date. It always has every detail
there is to be known. The trick is to sense it appropriately
Brooks, Rodney (1990), Elephants Don't Play
and often enough.[12]
Chess (PDF), Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6
(1-2): 315, doi:10.1016/S0921-8890(05)80025-9,
retrieved 2007-08-30.

3.4

Connectionism

Main article: connectionism

Cole, David (Fall 2004), The Chinese Room Argument, in Zalta, Edward N., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

3.5

Crevier, Daniel (1993), AI: The Tumultuous Search

for Articial Intelligence, New York, NY: BasicBooks, ISBN 0-465-02997-3

Embodied philosophy

Main article: embodied philosophy

George Lako, Mark Turner and others have argued that
our abstract skills in areas such as mathematics, ethics and
philosophy depend on unconscious skills that derive from
the body, and that conscious symbol manipulation is only
a small part of our intelligence.

See also
Articial intelligence, situated approach

Notes

[1] Newell & Simon 1976, p. 116 and Russell & Norvig 2003,
p. 18
[2] Nilsson 2007, p. 1
[3] Dreyfus 1979, p. 156, Haugeland, pp. 1544
[4] Horst 2005
[5] Dreyfus 1979, pp. 130148
[6] Haugeland 1985, p. 112
[7] Dreyfus 1979, pp. 91129, 170174

Dreyfus, Hubert (1972), What Computers Can't Do,

New York: MIT Press, ISBN 0-06-011082-1
Dreyfus, Hubert (1979), What Computers Still Can't
Do, New York: MIT Press.
Dreyfus, Hubert; Dreyfus, Stuart (1986), Mind over
Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell
Gladwell, Malcolm (2005), Blink: The Power of
Thinking Without Thinking, Boston: Little, Brown,
ISBN 0-316-17232-4.
Haugeland, John (1985), Articial Intelligence: The
Very Idea, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hobbes (1651), Leviathan.
Horst, Steven (Fall 2005), The Computational Theory of Mind, in Zalta, Edward N., The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Kurzweil, Ray (2005), The Singularity is Near, New
York: Viking Press, ISBN 0-670-03384-7.
McCarthy, John; Minsky, Marvin; Rochester,
Nathan; Shannon, Claude (1955), A Proposal for the
Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Articial Intelligence.

6
Newell, Allen; Simon, H. A. (1963), GPS: A Program that Simulates Human Thought, in Feigenbaum, E.A.; Feldman, J., Computers and Thought,
New York: McGraw-Hill
Newell, Allen;
Simon, H. A. (1976),
Communications of the ACM, Communications of the ACM 19 (3):
113126,
doi:10.1145/360018.360022 |chapter= ignored
(help)
Nilsson, Nils (2007), Lungarella, M., ed., 50 Years
of AI (PDF), Festschrift, LNAI 4850 (Springer): 9
17 |chapter= ignored (help)
Russell, Stuart J.; Norvig, Peter (2003), Articial
Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.), Upper
Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, ISBN 013-790395-2
Searle, John (1980), Minds, Brains and Programs,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417457,
doi:10.1017/S0140525X00005756
Turing, Alan (October 1950), Computing machinery and intelligence, Mind LIX (236): 433460,
doi:10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433

REFERENCES

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